; for, frightful to see, the eyes were open, and the
lids went on moving as if they would still pray, and this muscular
movement lasted for more than a quarter of an hour after the head had
been cut off.

The queen's servants had rushed upon the scaffold, picking up the book of
Hours and the crucifix as relics; and Jeanne Kennedy, remembering the
little dog who had come to his mistress, looked about for him on all
sides, seeking him and calling him, but she sought and called in vain.
He had disappeared.

At that moment, as one of the executioners was untying the queen's
garters, which were of blue satin embroidered in silver, he saw the poor
little animal, which had hidden in her petticoat, and which he was
obliged to bring out by force; then, having escaped from his hands, it
took refuge between the queen's shoulders and her head, which the
executioner had laid down near the trunk. Jeanne took him then, in spite
of his howls, and carried him away, covered with blood; for everyone had
just been ordered to leave the hall. Bourgoin and Gervais stayed behind,
entreating Sir Amyas Paulet to let them take the queen's heart, that they
might carry it to France, as they had promised her; but they were harshly
refused and pushed out of the hall, of which all the doors were closed,
and there there remained only the executioner and the corpse.

Brantome relates that something infamous took place there!

CHAPTER X

Two hours after the execution, the body and the head were taken into the
same hall in which Mary Stuart had appeared before the commissioners, set
down on a table round which the judges had sat, and covered over with a
black serge cloth; and there remained till three o'clock in the
afternoon, when Waters the doctor from Stamford and the surgeon from
Fotheringay village came to open and embalm them--an operation which they
carried out under the eyes of Amyas Paulet and his soldiers, without any
respect for the rank and sex of the poor corpse, which was thus exposed
to the view of anyone who wanted to see it: it is true that this
indignity did not fulfil its proposed aim; for a rumour spread about that
the queen had swollen limbs and was dropsical, while, on the contrary,
there was not one of the spectators but was obliged to confess that he
had never seen the body of a young girl in the bloom of health purer and
lovelier than that of Mary Stuart, dead of a violent death after nineteen
years of suffering and ca